Unhitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchens by Richard Seymour

A gleeful attack on Christopher Hitchens, his politics and his reputation misunderstands the man completely

Not ‘a joiner’: Christopher Hitchens, at home in America in 1993 (Catherine Karnow)

G
iven his rather showy atheism, it may be unrealistic to imagine Christopher
Hitchens peering down from on high at his friends and enemies disputing the
meaning of his premature death from oesophageal cancer 14 months ago.

Richard Seymour, an overpoweringly earnest Marxist of some stripe or other,
has leapt onto the terrain with unseemly glee. If ever a short book should
have been a long article in an obscure left-wing magazine, this is it.

The worst thing about Seymour’s book is that he thinks he writes as well as
Hitchens, with embarrassing consequences. It may be true that Hitchens’s
book on Thomas Paine was not his finest, but would anyone with English as a
first language suggest it should be classed as “a somewhat opuscular
component of the Hitchensian oeuvre”?

Not that he would have cared. As an old apostate Trot, Hitchens was suspicious
of bourgeois displays of sentimentality, or